The Man in the Gaberdine Suit
by Merlin Missy
Summary: Shadow comes home.


Written For girl_called_sun. Contains minor spoiler for the short story "Monarch of the Glen" With thanks to my beta Amilyn.

* * *

Shadow returns to America on the first of May. He thinks he ought to have taken a boat, a steamship or a liner, perhaps working his way across the Atlantic on the crew. He spends half a day in Edinburgh considering the image of himself, his big body sweating with work he doesn't know yet.

He buys an airplane ticket to Kennedy.

The airport has changed since he traveled here with his mother, the carryon luggage she always took with her. More security uniforms, more scrutiny of his passport, a matching watchfulness of his face with the unveiled question of who Shadow is and does he belong here?

"No," he wants to say. "I don't know where I belong." He learned about silence long ago, though, and he keeps his mouth shut until his identification is accepted and he is allowed formally to return to what ought to be his home.

The taxi driver from Jordan talks about Jesus Christ while Shadow nods along, and he asks to be let out near Times Square. May should be bright, but it's overcast and threatening a cold rain as Shadow pulls his suitcase from the trunk and tips the driver. The car pulls away in a burn of stinking exhaust, leaving Shadow on a street in a city he barely knows. Beside him is a shop that has "XXX" in neon letters. He's being advertised at for Coca-Cola and Conan O'Brien. People in suits and people with kids, people in modest dress and people in tight jeans, people talking on cell phones and people hurrying through the crowds of other people to get to their destinations. There are cars everywhere, it's too noisy, and the street smells of too many perfumes and colognes and the faint underscent of gutters used as urinals.

He is in America.

* * *

He doesn't have a plan. Plans shatter regularly, teacups on a parquet floor. Instead of planning Shadow visualizes an image, not as sharp as snow, but simple like the smell of fresh pie. He is going to walk to Indiana, and he is going to walk to Colorado, and he is going to walk to Santa Monica, then up the coast to San Francisco. If he meets Easter at the end of his walk, so much the better. If he doesn't, he doesn't.

He begins his walk by not walking at all. He takes a job washing dishes at a taqueria for not much per hour. His boss isn't interested in Shadow's history, not the prison term, not the warrants that came and went. His co-workers speak in a mixture of Spanish and English, punctuating their sentences with the slap of corn meal and flour to the well-worn countertops. He understands most of the gossip, but only nods along unless he's asked or told something directly. The back is too hot from the ovens firing all day, but he remembers the day he nearly froze to death in Lakeside, and he doesn't complain.

When he's saved up enough money for the first leg of his trip, he turns in his apron and buys a new pair of boots. It's July, and every step is full of sweat and mosquitoes as Shadow crosses Pennsylvania, moving from city to sprawl to long slopes of thick, lush mountains, eating away beneath his feet one step at a time. He sleeps when he's tired, eats when he's hungry, and doesn't buy a tent until Pittsburg, after the sky pissed on him all day long and he doesn't want to pay for a motel. Ohio is his motel state, he decides, slumbering uneasily as the condensation drips through the cheap nylon, making him damp and unhappy. He doesn't dream out here, though. It's worth the damp.

It's a Motel 6 right across the border when he gives in, paying for a night and a long, long hot shower. The face in the steamed mirror needs a shave. His body forgoes it for a stretched-out sleep on the queen-sized bed.

In his dream, the thunderbirds are flying high, out of reach. Part of his dream is set back in Scotland. Laura does not appear at all.

* * *

Columbus finds him with his pockets light and a restlessness Shadow cannot unpack with more walking. He pitches his tent in a park, and he follows the men who stand outside the hardware store waiting for work in the chilly pre-dawn air. Had he walked south instead of west, he could be picking tomatoes and oranges, sugarcane and cucumbers and sweet peaches. Here his hands are stained picking raspberries and blackberries, filling heavy buckets and hauling them through the fields. The work aches his back but calms his mind.

He stays in the park for two months, earning cash as the foremen call for workers. Shadow helps build a new community of townhouses, quick-framed and identical under the paint.

He sleeps, when he can, under the stars.

* * *

He arrives in Eagle Point in the middle of a downpour. His boots are sprung at the heels, collecting water in his disgustingly squelchy socks. His tent is a lost cause in the rain.

Laura's empty grave has been tended, probably by her mother. Her body was set to rest by the gods, the cleaners who came and swept the bloody battlefield, moved it all off-stage. Nothing to see here. Three years, approaching four, and he remembers the way her mouth tasted, her lipstick smearing as she pressed her small, lithe body against his. He doesn't recall the taste of the rot, or the feel of her cool, dead arms around his neck: every trembling horror fades eventually, and he did love her more than anything.

He could stay here. He doesn't have many prospects, not an ex-con like him, not someone who everyone knows. But he could find work, and settle down to whatever small life it would afford him. He could visit Laura's grave and make hamburgers or dig holes. He could even scratch together money over time and reopen the Muscle Farm himself.

He could.

Shadow flips a coin to make the decision, but he rigs the toss without even thinking about it.

* * *

His footsteps pause at the border to Illinois.

He goes north.

Autumn is dying in Chicago by the time he reaches the squat black brownstone. The air is nippy and threatens snow. Zorya Vechernyaya opens the door when Shadow knocks, her lemon-suck face taking him in one glance. "He said you would come."

"Zorya Vechernyaya," Shadow says with a bow and all his politeness in one place. "I brought gifts." Her smile breaks open as he gives her the bag of groceries he purchased before coming by: potatoes, bread, good wine, a pack of blackberries from the same company that had paid him to pick.

"These are yours," she says, opening the blackberries first and popping a greedy handful into her mouth. "Stay for dinner."

"Thank you."

Czernobog is returned after a long summer of Bielebog. His yellowed moustache twitches when he sees Shadow. Over their meal, Shadow opens his mouth for the first time, the first real time, and shares his plan.

Czernobog looks out through the shabby curtains. The snow has started, now that Shadow is indoors. "Colorado is piss-poor in the winter," he says.

Zorya Utrennyaya says, "You will stay here with us."

* * *

There's a movie theatre ten blocks from the brownstone. Shadow likes the quiet hush of a darkened house, the well-worn seats, and the warmth from the projector lights. Minimum wage goes directly into Zorya Vechernyaya's tight purse, but he has all the popcorn he can stand to eat and a warm place to sleep at night.

He sees her hiding in the darkened theatre, sitting for show after show. He would know what she is by her face: pale, stretched, and a bit too perfect. He knows her best by the projector light cast that goes right through her shimmering body. The other patrons watch her without seeing her, tarnish their own self-images as inadequate and inside out just by her presence in the tiered seats.

"What should I call you?" he asks her unafraid after the midnight show lets out.

"Cinema." She shakes her hair, which cascades like a shampoo ad in the wet dreams of a thousand marketers. "I'm not here to hurt you."

"I don't want to talk to you people anymore." If 'people' is the correct word, if 'talk' is what they want.

Even her laugh glitters. "The war is over, Shadow. Nobody won. Your man Wednesday screwed us all."

Shadow isn't stupid, no matter what they seem to think. "You're doing well. You come here to be worshipped every evening."

"And at the matinees," Cinema agrees.

"You don't look like you did." He remembers a woman like Marilyn Monroe.

"I died. I came back." She extends a hand. "This is my temple. They line up at ten dollars a ticket for the chance to worship me. You don't think that matters?"

"Can't say I care." He pushes past her and goes home thinking about the digital kid, wondering if another Infogod is lurking around the corner somewhere. As he enters his neighborhood, he breathes a sigh of ease: it's hard to picture anyone in this run-down area of the city giving praise to the Internet.

It's a bad time to spy a dish on someone's roof as he passes. Shadow shivers.

Cinema comes to all the shows. Sometimes she turns and smiles at him in his booth, and he can hear her thanking him for acting as her acolyte.

He quits his job, packs his few belongings, thanks Czernobog and the three sisters for their hospitality, and Shadow heads west.

* * *

He meets old gods along the roadside selling knickknacks at tacked-together stops. Some he recognizes from his travels and the study he made, after, but most are strangers to him. They all know Shadow, though. He's offered the random beer, or a couch for a night, or from one tiny woman who barely came up to his hip, a handful of dried corn and a comforting pat on the arm.

He cuts timber in Colorado and bunks with the other men. A small god lives in the town with them, a flannel and denim god who watches over cut arms and wild chainsaws, and who takes his offerings in blood on the snow.

"I evolved," says the god to Shadow over a pack of Coors. "They always prayed to me, the men to keep their hands, the wives to keep their husbands. Now they use sharper tools and pretend to follow OSHA regulations. I'm not going anywhere."

"I am going to see the ocean." Shadow's head is warm, his body is warm. He always pictured the mountains as a harsh yet beautiful terrain, rugged and manly and all that other stuff mountains ought to be, interspersed with ski lodges and cute women in snowsuits who owned hot tubs. The reality is deep-packed snow that keeps them bound inside for days at a time, and cold so deep it can kill a man for daring to breathe.

* * *

When the spring thaw comes, Shadow goes. He hitchhikes to Vegas. He knows he meets someone there but when he goes to the cheap motel room later that evening, the name escapes him. The next day he sees a tired old god whose lot it is not to grant prayers, and the empty slot-machine face is enough to put him back on the road fast.

Santa Monica is a bust. The ocean smells like Los Angeles exhaust, and the seagulls are bastards. Cinema is waiting for him, standing on every corner, but she is a working girl after all. He doesn't stay.

Shadow hikes up the coast, watching the climate and terrain slowly change over days. By day the sun sends him visions of an ocean even vaster than the one falling away at his left. By night the coyotes follow his steps without coming too close to him or harassing him. He's not tired anymore. As he walks his steps grow lighter, easier, and he walks all night as the stars wheel around in the clear sky above him.

He's in the desert when it happens: like slipping on rocks, he goes backstage.

Beside him is one of the coyotes, who is also a man crouched down on all fours. He extends his arms and legs, and he stands up straight. He's completely naked, skin a solid brown from the sun. He kept the bushy tail.

"Did you do this?" asks Shadow.

"No, man. This is all you. Don't fuck it up."

The god walks away. Shadow watches him until he's gone. Then Shadow looks to the eye-searing horizon. Already his stomach is churning.

"I came back," he says to the empty landscape.

He doesn't know why he's here, or why he said it. He doesn't know why he had to come back to America, only that he did.

"Are you a monster?"

Behind him is a figure who looks like Smith, slim as a knife, and made of weasel-skin.

Shadow's been through this before. "No."

"You're not a god either," says a giant spider with yellow highlights. "I was wondering when you were going to show up. You should've come down to Florida to visit me. I'll pretend I'm not offended you didn't."

"That wasn't my path," Shadow says, and Anansi nods his strange head.

"No, I guess it wasn't."

"You don't belong here." This god Shadow doesn't know by name or face, the formless energy reminding him of notes of music, or light poking through a cloudy day.

"How can I leave?"

"You have to cut the thread," Anansi says. His pincers and mandibles demonstrate as he lets out a length of silk. "And don't think I don't notice you're looking at my ass." He places the silk in Shadow's hand. It's not sticky, but it shimmers like Cinema does.

"I don't understand."

Anansi says, "You've been wandering your whole life and you don't know why. You're not a man, you're a walking reaction because part of you is always here. Problem with being half-divine. My boys run into trouble with that of a time. You're a little bit god, Shadow, and you've drawn yourself across the country without a single worshipper. It's half a life. It's no life at all. Cut the cord, and you're entirely human."

Shadow looks at the silk again. "I've read up on you. You're a trickster and a liar."

"I am that. What are you?"

The desert is empty, the stars over his head are the stars Shadow knows. Several yards away, a coyote rests its head on its paws, tongue lolling out like a dog that's in on the joke.

Shadow wraps a whip-thin cord around his wrist like a bracelet and he goes to sleep.

* * *

A hippie in a new Volkswagon Beetle drives him to the Haight. Easter isn't hard to find, not with the gaggle of homeless kids coming out for her feast in the park. She brings Shadow into a fierce hug, and presses a plate of boiled eggs into his hands.

"You look half-starved. Terrible thing for a big man."

Shadow eats, and then he naps under the wide leaves of a tree while Easter sings something with a low and off-beat melody like a Dead jam, like John Lennon's best trip. He's not sure when he's sleeping and when he wakes, but she's still there, still singing.

Her hands play with the spider silk around his wrist. "So have you decided?"

He's aware of his body, covered with a month's worth of the road, and grit from a place that may not technically exist. He reeks. "I want to swim in the ocean."

"All right."

She packs a picnic basket and they stroll hand in hand down to the beach. It's sunset when they arrive, the close of the beach but no one bothers them as Shadow takes off his clothes. Easter watches unembarrassed.

The water is still cold with the spring. Shadow kicks and swims, feeling his journey wash off him.

Treading water, he pulls up the spider silk in front of his eyes. He takes an end in each hand and pulls. It stretches and snaps like chewing gum. Something inside Shadow does as well. He opens his hands, feels the pure flow of water between his fingers. For a long time, he does nothing but feel the water.

On the shore, a woman is waving to him. She's middle-aged, pleasantly curvy on the edge of plump, a faded beauty.

Shadow wonders who she is.

* * *

The End


End file.
